R.S.F. America

You don’t try to reason with thugs and madmen. You just don’t. In the movie “The Jazz Singer”, there’s a simple but profound question the father asks the son: “How do you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?” The thing he leaves out is that you’ve got to learn from where you’ve been or it does you no good. Let’s see where we’ve been.

Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister of Britain on May 28, 1937. Over the next two years Chamberlain’s government and philosophy became associated with a foreign policy known to this day as appeasement. Chamberlain believed that Germany had been badly treated by the allies after it was defeated in the First World War and that the German Government had some genuine grievances that needed to be addressed. He also thought that by agreeing to some of the demands being made by Adolf Hitler of Germany and Benito Mussolini of Italy, he could avoid a European war.

Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary he brought on-board after policy disagreements with [Halifax's predecessor] Anthony Eden in 1938, talked with these madmen. After his first visit to Nazi Germany Halifax said he “liked the German leaders, even Goebbels, and he was much impressed, interested and amused by the visit”. He thinks the regime “absolutely fantastic.” They signed agreements and Chamberlain was convinced the Fascist threat had been averted. More scraps of paper, like so many that have come before, good only for cannon fodder. Has anyone ever heard of World War Two?

Well, here we are on the brink of World War Three and it’s 1938 all over again but nobody seems to notice. The names have changed but the conditions, threats and reactions are identical. It appears we’ve learned nothing! Does anyone understand that peace comes only through victory? Appeasers are coming out of the woodwork: England, France, Germany and a good part of the rest of the world. Then, enter our own self-serving, power at any price Democrats and the parade of ill-informed, misinformed, uninformed pacifists marching in lock step behind them. None of them get it. They don’t even acknowledge that Iraq is part of the war on terror. Iraq is but one of the battles in that war and the closest thing to a front-line we currently have. Retreat now and it frees terrorist resources to make America the battlefield. It also would create a bloodbath in Iraq which at the least parallels The Killing Fields of Cambodia. Excuse me. I said retreat, I meant re-deploy. As I’ve said before, I’m all in favor of re-deployment. We need to re-deploy some of our B2 and B52 bombers to The Middle East, not diplomats.

What do you say to a guy who already told you several times that he’s going to kill you as soon as he gets the chance? Is there any reason to doubt that? “Hey, we’re really just a bunch of nice guys” isn’t going to cut it against a hate that goes back 5,000 years. Islamic hatred of infidels like the Americans, Israelis, English and the rest of Western Civilization goes all the way back to The Crusades during The Middle Ages. It didn’t just start with 9/11. The only thing I’d have to say to that Opthalmologist Al-Assad who runs Syria or a serious nutcase like Iran’s Ahmed-alphabet is, “Stop sending men and supplies to kill our troops in Iraq, plus forget about anything nuclear or we’ll blow you off the face of the earth!” If you “talk the talk” with these guys, we’d better be ready to “walk the walk”. We can’t take military options off the table and we have to be ready to use them in a big way. Here are just a few of the reasons you don’t sit down at a “neighborhood meeting”, or any other place, trying to reason with the unreasonable:

• You’ve got nothing to gain and everything to lose. They have nothing to begin with so any compromise you make automatically means you’ve given something away.
• You elevate them to a status they don’t deserve. These are petty little thugs with ragged little countries. You don’t grant them equal status with historically significant powers like the United States or Britain. That’s exactly what they’re looking for and it’s a bad precedent.
• You’re wasting valuable time and expanding the window of opportunity they have to prepare the evil they’re planning to unleash upon you later. You can take them out now or go back and fight them when they are stronger.
• If you’re going to deal you must deal from a position of strength. With the appeasers and Liberal ignoramuses we have running around this country right now, we don’t have that advantage.
• Just the fact that you’ve sat down with them in the first place is seen by vermin like these as weakness.
• They’ll lie through their teeth and won’t keep any agreements they make in the first place. Good old Saddam Hussein proved that again and again, to say nothing of the aforementioned Hitler and Mussolini. By the way, weren’t we negotiating with the Japanese when they attacked us at Pearl Harbor? None of these are men of good faith in case you haven’t noticed.

I am shocked and concerned that President Bush has agreed to these Middle Eastern talks because it’s a 180-degree reversal to his previous policy, which made a lot of sense. This doesn’t. From the U.S. standpoint it’s pointless. I only hope this is part of some master plan he isn’t telling us about and not the kind of capitulation it appears to be on the surface.

R.S.F.